Over about five decades, Dolphin Action and Protection Group founder Nan Rice worked tirelessly to protect dolphins, whales and porpoises, and many other marine creatures, driven by deep passion and unswayable conviction, and reinforced with tenacity, courage and chutzpah.

"To hear a whale blow is like hearing the breath of life"

(A quote by prominent South African marine conservationist Nan Rice during a 1990 interview with the Los Angeles Times. Rice died earlier this month in Cape Town, aged 93)

Early one December morning in 1969, a woman in her mid-thirties stood on the beach at Hout Bay and watched with growing horror and helpless fury as a school of about 200 panicking dusky dolphins tried desperately to escape the trek fishing net that surrounded them. Dolphins enjoyed no legal protection of any kind at that time, and word was that 10 of these animals were to be selected for a life of captivity in a pool at a Cape Town zoo.

While most of the trapped dolphins, many of them bleeding, were thrashing frantically against the sides of the net in a desperate effort to escape, several were hauled unceremoniously out of the water and flung onto foam mattresses on the beach where they were injected, presumably with a tranquilliser.

Four of the captured dolphins died on the beach, and when the rest of the school were eventually released from the net, they appeared too traumatised to swim...